> To ensure the Pi sees a steady voltage when the full inference stack kicks in (and to afford crankers a little rest), we built a custom capacitor board [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Zv_Hsinvx_sWtdur4iWY...] to smooth out the generator’s output and act as a short-term (~20 second) power reservoir.
Somewhat off-topic, but could this capacitor board work with a small-ish 5V USB solar panel? I'm not great with electronics, but it seems like just the solution for a device I want to run with the panel.
My vague impression was it's not kosher per the USB spec to just stick a capacitor across the supply to even out the brown-outs, but this looks like it's doing some other stuff.
[0]: https://www.sdxcentral.com/news/chip-designer-taalas-bets-on...
And also it mades me realize that we would all be way more healthy if we powered our laptops from bike power.
No way there are still so many human devs in the office.
(although I salute the attention it brings to an important cause)
I really want to know, no matter how big that number unfortunately is.
Fortunately, at the bottom there is a link to the "technical documentation" (https://squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank/) which is vastly improved (aside from being light-mode-only and linked from a dark-mode-only marketing page). It also gives me much more interesting information (specifically: models that can apparently run acceptably on a Pi 5).
Please let me read your content with a scrollbar that works the way scroll bars are supposed to, rather than turning everything into a weird slide show where you don't actually know when the next slide is coming. Please let me just click on buttons that look like links to more information, without JavaScript.
All that to say, CrankGPT, I am your target demographic and if you don't respond to my request for a demo I'll be cranking my keyboard with bad reviews online. Or cranking a rowing machine that powers an LLM to do it for me. Wait...
What I need is something to prevent me from context drift. /starts googling how many scrambled eggs are equivalent to the energy consumed by a data center. Google how many chickens are in the world.../
What I love is this quote is super-imposed with a background image that has gas-burning smokestacks but also nuclear cooling towers in the same field.
This is a bit representational of this particular line of protest against AI - just super confused about it all and thrashing out.
Green energy has been (technologically) solved, but instead we want to go back to manual labor as a source of power? Hilarious.
The math isn’t as bad as you might think: 200Wh (about a 60 min, somewhat intense ride) seems to be about 20 minutes for a H/B100. Still 3x, but not bad at all!
I remember the idea being dismissed quickly because people would likely actually want it.
I feel like it is not only an interesting engineering challenge but one that might lead to a more efficient and sustainable framing.
Voice recognition was done via parrot + handy.computer Basically: different key combos were tied to different actions, e.g. \
- hold A to speak
- move the crank slowly to navigate
- crank super fast to send the prompt
(I can share the source -- just let me know if this is actually useful)
Also, I feel like the author and me have similar hobbies. A few years back I almost won a (re-sellable on Ebay) award for https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io !
(I lost to a gallery of 3d sandwiches)
Seems a little on the nose to me, but I guess some days it's hard to tell what's a gag and what's a legit pitch.
There's a technical documentation link at the bottom of the page that documents an actual working hand-crank-powered Raspberry Pi that runs a local model.
Regardless of this website presentation, the idea is sound and I'm behind it. We need to stop giving everything away to a hyper concentrated group of wealthy super elites that do not have our best interests at heart. We already have disappointing politicians that are elected. Now we also have disappointing unelected rich decision makers altering our lives based on what bar they had their next back of napkin scheme at.
It’s also interesting that the industry has settled on using watts to mean rate of useful work whereas calories to mean the total work including inefficiencies, despite that calories is just a unit of energy. A rule of thumb for cyclists is that in addition to usual unit conversions, the “calories” figure should be multiplied by four to account for energy expended by the body but not used for rotating the pedals. I don’t use rowing machines but I’m sure they would have a similar conversion factor in order to calculate calories.
"Conspiracy call-in" on a CB radio would be a good variation!
Edit: I confess, kind of tempted, 41 EUR for a "big" one https://www.bol.com/be/fr/p/zimoros-handslingergenerator-kra...
You are the silent majority?
No doubt non technical people have different UX experience than tech nerd, but I have seen plenty of "normal" people curse at artsy fluffy design, that made known navigation skills useless and nobody likes their time wasted.
The Concept2 rowing machines can power itself using the power you generate by rowing, so we're partly there.
It's the only unit that makes sense tbh
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal-fired_power_station#/medi...
EDIT: To elaborate a bit, if you are burning oil or gas in a turbine, you do not need a cooling tower, the waste heat goes into the atmosphere with the exhaust. If you use fossil or nuclear fuels to produce steam for a steam turbine, you either need a river with enough flow to not boil all the fish if you reject the waste heat into it or you need a cooling tower to reject the heat into the atmosphere.
Obviously the peloton crowd is biased towards people who will have better endurance and higher FTP, but basically the upshot is you could run one card for one hour with the effort of a 100km long ride which most recreational cyclists do once a week.
[0] https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/
You can scroll normally, with all your favorite keys, or go super fast to the bottom
It’s just scroll animations. Bad ones, admittedly.
My own is ~250W @ 3.12W/kg. I can't even hit 700W yet, let alone for over a minute. My 5 second power is ~640W.
Crazy numbers.
I would suspect my equivalency to be about 1/3rd a Robert [unit of measure from vidlink].
However you can expect around only 3 watts of output at normal speeds and you will need to put in around 5-7 watts of power for the same speed. This is barely enough to trickle charge modern phones.
We're sadly not that efficient. The 150kcal/6h=600kcal/day you've mentioned aren't enough, and it takes more than 600kcal to create 600kcal plus transportation into your home
Besides, we won't stop existing, so any math about "chatgpt uses X kW and so it's better than hiring another human" doesn't work out. The human doesn't stop burning fuels when not in use: any LLM usage is additional energy that needs to be generated while staying within CO2 budgets
Except you can’t.
I scroll down, and the content of the page doesn’t move as expected.
Humans are efficient, but not across the board. Trivial counterexample: walking is incredibly energy inefficient vs a bicycle or other wheeled conveyances whose primary dissipater is rolling resistance.
If you like then "golden," perhaps the entire box.
I will probably end up with no sound system and just expensive dynamo lights, using a USB speaker that doubles up as a power brick.
There is a nice USB battery kit for dynamo that fits in the steerer, so it is soldering iron time for that, so might as well learn how to do USB-C power things.
One day there will be structural solar panel batteries that can be 3D printed into lightweight bicycle frames, so maybe I will stick to throwaway lights until then!
For an average untrained male cyclist who is 175lb, they should be able to maintain 1.5-2 w/kg over an hour, or 120-160watts. A beginner cyclist who's been cycling recreationally over over a year should be able to attain 2-2.5w/kg which is 160-200 watts. A recreational cyclist who's be training for several years should be able to maintain 200 watts.
Trust me, I'm a cyclist, and I cycle with a power meter.
Might this just be selection bias? I mean, if humans can't do a task efficiently, we're not going to do the comparison with a machine.
Some actions we do seem (to me) very inefficient when compared with machines. For example: grating carrots and brushing teeth.
Even without a battery, I could easily imagine designing an efficient single slice toaster that could handily brown a pop tart on a 300W budget.
Electrochemical reactions in your muscles combined with the mechanical advantage from the geometry of your joints and ligaments is simply more energy efficient than most mechanical or electromechanical systems. On top of that, our learned and evolved kinematic algorithms result in vastly more efficient control. Humans tend to be pretty good at using only exactly as much energy as required for a given action. Overshoot is quite limited compared to robots.
Your suggested actions seem inefficient, but if you look at the actual energy expenditure, mechanical means are much worse simply because mammalian muscle is so efficient.
I read efficiency as "Energy inputted to accomplish a task", in which case, biological systems are far more efficient than current-day mechanical ones. It's a tradeoff.
please don't inflict your music on everyone around you.
Imagine the work(out)station of the future.
</s> (or not)
If someone said they pick up trash on the side of the road to help the environment you wouldn't say the logical conclusion of their ideology would be that they become the unabomber
Or what I actually use for ssh on the road: https://github.com/klausw/hackerskeyboard
Google kicked it from their store because it still supports older Androids but it still works just fine on the latest versions. It's on F-Droid.
Lost the opportunity to say "bread".
Er… I meant to say cranks with keyboards. Sorry. It was a rough weekend.
What are you balancing if not human growth? And how do you plan to do that?
If it’s unsustainable population growth there will eventually be some catastrophic environmental effects and the population will be reduced to a sustainable level. Of course living during that reduction could be a rather unpleasant experience but it probably also won’t last too long.
If it’s already sustainable everything is fine.
Basically, you can probably charge your macbook at peek power for an hour every other day, or every day for a short while if you're okay with burning out eventually.
Expect to need to eat 400-600 calories and a lot of water each time you do this.
Considering the difficulty of sustaining 700 watts vs 350 watts, we could've had some very well-burnt toast if they uninstalled the heating coils for the 2nd piece of bread!
While watching the video, I was wondering how they modified the >1kW device to produce a toasted toast in that short amount of time (I guess you could substitute instantaneous power for time up to a point, but the video wasn't that long), thinking maybe they removed one of the sides' circuits. Now I'm disappointed as well. Thanks xD
Introducing
CrankGPT
CrankGPT
Use the appropriate tool for the job.
Use the right tool for the job.
Our basic hand-cranked model is sufficient for everyday home use.
Power users and small companies should consider our more capable pedal-powered models.
For complex agentic and enterprise workflows, we're pursuing partnerships with gyms and fitness studios.
We think privacy is serious business. Why give mega-corps access to our most burning questions, our innermost thoughts, and our wacky app ideas? CrankGPT runs entirely on device so your data stay yours.
Remember the days when we worried about the climate effects of crypto? Ha! How quaint. Tech companies have quietly abandoned their climate pledges to build gas-burning power plants that feed your favorite AI. Stop burning oil and start burning calories by producing your own tokens with CrankGPT!
Don't ask ChatGPT, the answer is no. They have too much money and influence already. Unfortunately, they've gotten you so hooked on tokens that you'll unthinkingly pay more for them than they cost to generate. Go off grid with CrankGPT—save money AND keep it out of tech CEOs' pockets!
You're busy crushing it, we get it, but sometimes taking care of business gets in the way of taking care of yourself. Produce your own tokens with CrankGPT. The harder you're working, the harder you're working out.
No cloud/Claude required
No Wi-Fi? Claude outage? Rolling blackouts? The end of civilization as we know it? With CrankGPT, you'll never be without the intelligence you need. We're no preppers, but with CrankGPT, we're prepared.
